Comprehensive Review—Analysis ❮ 127
- define the term;
- cite examples;
- provide practice with analysis; and
- offer suggestions for writing your own AP essays using that strategy.
Rhetorical Strategies
Example
Definition: Example is a specific event, person, or detail of an idea cited and/or developed
to support or illustrate a thesis or topic.
Here is an excerpt from Jane Jacobs’s “A Good Neighborhood” that uses examples.
Perhaps I can best explain this subtle but all-important balance between people’s desire
for essential privacy and their wish to have differing degrees of contact with people
in terms of the stores where people leave keys for their friends. In our family, we tell
friends to pick up the key at the delicatessen across the street. Joe Cornacchia, who keeps
the delicatessen, usually has a dozen or so keys at a time for handing out like this. He
has a special drawer for them.
Around on the other side of our block, people leave their keys at a Spanish grocery.
On the other side of Joe’s block, people leave them at a candy store. Down a block they
leave them at the coffee shop, and a few hundred feet around the corner from that,
in a barber shop. Around one corner from two fashionable blocks of town houses and
apartments in the Upper East Side, people leave their keys in a butcher shop and a
bookshop; around another corner they leave them in a cleaner’s and a drug store. In
unfashionable East Harlem, keys are left with at least one florist, in bakeries, in lun-
cheonettes, in Spanish and Italian groceries.
Practice with Analysis
- Underline the thesis statement.
- The topic /subject of the passage is.
- The purpose of the passage is to.
- Does the passage contain an extended example?
- The passage contains how many examples?
- Brief ly list the examples.
- The organization is chronological spatial least to most important
most to least important.
Remarks About the Passage
This informative passage uses a lengthy list of examples to indicate in formally the rela-
tionship between people and businesses in a neighborhood. There is no single extended
example, but rather a series of more than eight examples.
It’s a good idea to actually mark up the passage as you answer the analysis questions. It
will give you practice and help this process to become second nature to you.
KEY IDEA
TIP
